1938 and counting... A Public (Mental) Health Odyssey? c/o Virginia Woolf

individual

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic -------------------------------------------  mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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group-population

"A deep concern with subjugated knowledges and with the arts of human communication expressed 50 years ago by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas. Virginia Woolf, too, was concerned about how education contributed to ...

... the barbarity of mechanised warfare.

Since 'the old education of the old colleges breeds neither a particular respect for liberty nor a particular hatred of war', she wrote, 'it is clear that you must build your colleges differently   (Woolf, 1977, p.39). Asking 'what should be taught in the new college, the poor college?', she replied thus:

Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. . . The poor college must teach only the arts can be taught cheaply and practised by poor people; such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature. ... The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialise, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to co-operate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life. (Ibid. pp.39-40)"

Virginia Woolf (1977). [1938] Three Guineas. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Robins, K. and Webster, F. (1989). The Technical Fix: Education, Computers and Industry. Basingstoke: Macmillan. p. 275.